Posts Tagged ‘$12.8 trilllion’

There’s a memorable line in the movie, The Hunt For Red October. A fanatic Soviet submarine skipper – trying to complete his mission to destroy the renegade Soviet sub “Red October” before it escapes to America – makes a fatal overconfident miscalculation. As the torpedo he fired boomerangs back toward the very submarine that fired it, a Russian officer turns to the captain and shouts:

“You arrogant ass! You’ve killed US!”

Essentially, a hedge fund that was wildly successful last year is betting that the American people will be shouting that very same line at Barack Obama.

A hedge fund firm that reaped huge rewards betting against the market last year is about to open a fund premised on another wager: that the massive stimulus efforts of global governments will lead to hyperinflation.

The firm, Universa Investments L.P., is known for its ties to gloomy investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the 2007 bestseller “The Black Swan,” which describes the impact of extreme events on the world and financial markets.

Funds run by Universa, which is managed and owned by Mr. Taleb’s long-time collaborator Mark Spitznagel, last year gained more than 100% thanks to its bearish bets. …

June 1 (Bloomberg) — Universa Investments LP, the hedge- fund firm advised by “Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb, is adding a new strategy, betting that government efforts to pump money into economies around the world won’t prevent deflation or could result in hyperinflation. […]

“Policy makers have no control over the outcome of their actions,” Taleb said. “The plane they are flying will either hit the mountain, which is hyperinflation, or crash in the ocean, which is deflation. There is a chance of the pilot hitting the runway. But if he’s not skilled, it’s less than he thinks.”

SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?

OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.

And that $1.7 trillion figure from the C-SPAN interview, as bad as it is (I mean, you have to understand: people complained about Bush’s spending raising our debt $1.2 trillion over THREE YEARS), is still likely a lowball figure. The numbers keep changing. McClatchy Newspapers has an article describing the rosy numbers, fuzzy math, and constantly changing numbers coming out of the Obama administration.

Based on our analysis, the deficit is actually $2.2 trillion for the fiscal year or nearly 100 percent higher than is being reported. In fact, the deficit will finish the fiscal year at an astonishing 15.5 percent of GDP! Federal spending will rise to 32 percent of GDP.

U.S. government securities have tumbled 4.3 percent this year, the worst performance since Merrill Lynch & Co. began tracking returns in 1978, as so-called bond vigilantes drove up yields to punish President Barack Obama for increasing the budget shortfall.

Concerns about international investors have grown as the U.S. Dollar Index weakened 8.6 percent since February and Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke committed $12.8 trillion to thaw frozen credit markets and snap the longest U.S. economic slump since the 1930s.

The comment provoked loud laughter from the audience of students. There are growing fears over the size and sustainability of the US budget deficit, which is set to rise to almost 13pc of GDP this year as the world’s biggest economy fights off recession. The US is reliant on China to buy many of the government bonds it is planning to issue but Beijing’s policymakers have expressed concern about the strength of the dollar and the value of their investments.

Obama has until October to sell about $1.9 trillion in debt. Geithner is actually in China right now to pitch a major bond sale next week. And neither China nor anyone else seems crazy enough to keep buying our debt in sufficient amounts to fill our bottomless pit of federal spending. That means either that the US has to raise interest rates to make its debt more attractive – which will kill the economy and plunge the US into a further cycle of recession – or else simply keep printing money which creates the core element of hyperinflation.

“You arrogant ass! You’ve killed US!”

Obama and the Democratic spin machine keep laying the blame on Bush policies, but it is Obama’s spending that has created this “Sophie’s Choice,” not anything that Bush did.

It wasn’t Bush who fired the salvo of spending “torpedoes” that are now coming back to blow up in the bowels of our economic and financial system. It has been Obama’s uncontrolled spending.

It certainly isn’t just Universa and it’s “Black Swan” fund that is betting on Obama-caused hyperinflation, just as it isn’t just the UK Telegraph comparing the US under Obama to Zimbabwe, as a brief excerpt from Bloomberg shows:

May 27 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. economy will enter “hyperinflation” approaching the levels in Zimbabwe because the Federal Reserve will be reluctant to raise interest rates, investor Marc Faber said.

Prices may increase at rates “close to” Zimbabwe’s gains, Faber said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Hong Kong. Zimbabwe’s inflation rate reached 231 million percent in July, the last annual rate published by the statistics office.

“I am 100 percent sure that the U.S. will go into hyperinflation,” Faber said. “The problem with government debt growing so much is that when the time will come and the Fed should increase interest rates, they will be very reluctant to do so and so inflation will start to accelerate.”

David Rosenberg, the chief economist at Gluskin Sheff, disagrees slightly with Marc Farber and the Black Swan fund: he doesn’t think that the savage beast of hyperinflation will begin devouring the U.S. economy until after consumer spending has rebounded. In a Newsmax article entitled, “Experts Fear U.S. Will Suffer Zimbabwe-Level Inflation,” Rosenberg is quoted as having told The Wall Street Journal, “Not until the household sector expands its balance sheets are we likely to see the re-emergence of inflation on a sustained basis.” It’s not that we’re not doomed; it’s merely a question as to how long before we’re doomed.

I feel another refrain from the song we’re singing coming on:

“You arrogant ass! You’ve killed US!”

Famed Trends Research CEO Gerald Celente has predicted food riots in the United States by 2012. He put his reputation on the line by making that claim. Now we’ve got more financial experts like Marc Farber, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, David Rosenberg, and a mega-successful hedge fund putting their money where their mouth is in essentially predicting the same scale of disaster.

Like the Russian submarine skipper who arrogantly and foolishly removed the safeties from his missiles which would have protected his sub from his own torpedoes, Barack Obama has arrogantly and foolishly taken actions that will torpedo the U.S. economy. It’s only a matter of how much time we can dodge the impending explosion of massive spending triggering massive inflation.